Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL)

“Enabling masses to build a knowledge society and ensuring communication without language barrier and moving up the knowledge chain”

In a multi-lingual country like India, the primary concern and challenge underlying any activity lies in offering universal access to information and services to more and more people in their own language. As the world is in midst of a technological revolution nucleated around Information and Communication Technology (ICT), advances in Human Language Technology (HLT) makes it convenient for people in their interaction with machines. As tool to support language diversity and addressing the pressing needs of information empowerment advances in Indian language technology it has the power to benefit a wide gamut of people with diverse backgrounds from an illiterate land tiller wanting to know the relevant land records of his small land to high-end Computer professionals in state-of-the-art laboratories focusing on problem fixing.

In India, multilingual web-content is poised for accelerated growth and there is, therefore, a huge challenge to provide user friendly and cost-effective tools, applications and contents that enable access to ICT infrastructure in various Indian Languages. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology initiated the ambitious programme of TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) with the aim of developing Information Processing Tools and Techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier; creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources and integrating them to develop innovative user products and services. The primary objectives include developing and promoting Software Tools and Applications for all 22 officially recognized Indian Languages, contributing to collaborative development of futuristic technologies leading to innovative products and services, acting as a catalyst for proliferating Language Technology products and providing solutions and standardization across all levels.

Some of the other major initiatives undertaken are in the realm of Cross Lingual, Information Access and Retrieval, Human Machine Interface systems, Text to Speech system (TTS), Language processing and Web tools, adapting IT Tools and solutions in Indian languages, Human Resource Development in Language Technology et al.